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SALUTARY NEGLECT ESSAY For the period before 1750 analyze the way in which the British policy of salutary neglect influenced the development of American society as illustrated in legislature assemblies commerce and religion The policy of salutary neglect influenced the development of American society It gave the colonies a chance to govern themselves and to develop separately from England It let them make their own laws that would benefit the people in the colonies Because of this there was religious freedom It unified the colonies and gave them a sense of nationalism Even though England believed in a system of mercantilism Sir Robert Walpole espoused a view of salutary neglect In this system the British had very little interference in the international affairs of the American colonies Walpole believed that this enhanced freedom for the colonists would stimulate commerce The policy had allowed the colonists to develop their own political institutions to the extent of making their own legislative assemblies as local equivalents of the Westminster parliament to be the main protector of their rights to life liberty and property In Britain Westminster parliament had greatly increased its own role in the political life of the nation and the political elite there started to believe more in the constitutional doctrine that ultimately sovereignty lay with the king-in-parliament The people in Britain believed that the parliament had control over the American colonies and so long as this authority was restricted to the regulation of Atlantic trade and the control of the colonies external relations the colonists did not take it as a violation of their rights The American colonists did not realize that this could be a threat to their own legislative institutions In the early eighteenth century both the colonies and Britain were developing distinctive ideas of the power and authority of their own legislatures without clearly defining the boundaries of each others power over what happens in the colonies Dickinson pp 6 From

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